ARN-SHMUEL TAMARES

ARN-SHMUEL TAMARES (1869-August 12, 1931)

            Known by his pen name “Aḥad harabanim hamargishim” (One of the sensitive rabbis), he was born in Maltsh (Malecz), Grodno district.  From 1893 until his death, he was rabbi in the small town of Mileytshits (Milejczyce).  He was a well-known rabbinical-intellectual personality, an original and unique figure in the Jewish world of thought.  He fought against Zionism (earlier, he was for it), against nationalism, against the petrification of Orthodoxy; for uncompromising pacifism, territorialism, and a Crimean land project.  In his last years he grew closer to Agudat Yisrael.  He wrote mainly for the Hebrew-language press and published several religious texts in Hebrew.  In Yiddish he published a pamphlet entitled Farn tsar fun a nirdef (For the grief of a persecuted man), “illuminating the ‘Radom matter’ [the struggle of the Radom Jewish community against the imposition of R. Yekhiel Kestenberg] and incidentally also the full batch of painful events…in the Jewish world” (Pyetrkov, 1927/1928).  He also wrote articles in Fraynd (Friend) (1911), the daily newspaper Dos yudishe velt (The Jewish world) in Warsaw 219 (1917), the popular Dos folk (The people) (1922), Vilna’s Dos vort (The word) and Vilner tog (Vilna day) 35-41 (1925) (a series of articles against Zev Jabotinsky’s Jewish Legions), Aguda’s Der yud (The Jew), and elsewhere.  Among his Hebrew books: Musar hatora vehayahadut (The etiquette of the Torah and Judaism) (Vilna: Garber, 1912), 174 pp.; Sefer haemuna haṭehora vehadat hahamonit (Pure faith and mass religion) (Odessa: N. Halprin, 1912), 71 pp.; Kneset yisroel umilḥamot hagoyim (The congregation of Israel and the wars of the gentiles) (Warsaw, 1920), 83 pp.  He died in Warsaw.

Sources: Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 4; Getzel Kressel, Leksikon hasifrut haivrit (Handbook of Hebrew literature), vol. 2 (Merḥavya, 1967); Arn Tsaytlin, in Tog-morgn-zhurnal (New York) (September 22, 1961).

Berl Cohen